It’s a disturbing trend.
Web site owners think that the more you pester readers with pop-up questions that the visitor to the site will appreciate this harassment. They think that offering free this-and-thats, shady news bits and product offerings is the way to get our attention.
They are wrong.
In 2017 I began noticing this new set of trends in the following areas with browser technology. I call it “Sanctioned Browser Harassment” or SBH. The categories of SBH we will cover are shown in the list below:
- Browsers being outfitted with notification technology and an ever increasing number of sites asking if we want notifications from THEIR site.
- Auto-play of videos whether you like it or not and when you scroll down the site page, the video shrinks in size and follows your navigation down the page.
- Sudden event-driven pop-up of messages that assault your senses in a variety of ways on a site page, usually on the first visit to a page or as you pass your mouse pointer over a portion of the page.
- Forced survey and interactive scripts, demanding the user interact with the site in a way they are not prepared for.
- And finally, pop-ups that sense the user is using ad-blocker technology and totally REFUSING to share content on the basis of the browser owner having this engaged.
This collection of technological harassment expansion in browsers arrived almost simultaneously in the 2016-2017 time-frame and has become a major annoyance for anyone visiting web sites.
Perhaps the browser manufacturers and site owners feel they are doing you are service, pushing their annoying standards and offers with a positively disgusting NEED to notify you at all times of their wish to deliver content to you.
It is clear that these additions to browser technologies were done at the behest of the browser manufacturers themselves but what drove these additions remain unknown. Perhaps it was the market demanding more ways to deliver hucksters to assault your senses in your browser experience. Who is to say. But the effect has been the same as finding one’s self in a Brazilian jungle at night with no bug nets.
Tackling the first one, notifications from a web site of new content (#1 in my list above), lets discuss that.
There *may* be some value in this feature, but when I tried to disable this feature in a couple of browsers, I was surprised to find there is virtually no “off” button to stop web sites from presenting that God-Awful pop-up message asking if you want notifications from their site.
A note to you Browser-manufacturers and plugin designers: We NEED and want an effective means of putting a stop to this pop-up practice. Please design an off-switch so we don’t get these. We’re sick of being harassed.
Moving on to numbers 2 and 3 in my list: Let’s make something clear to site owners who practice one or more variants of these sorts of harassing practices – WE DON’T LIKE IT!
Was I not clear enough? Well, let’s drive the point home.
We are LESS and not MORE likely to visit your web site if you engage in constant pop-up and video auto-play harassment of us the moment we make the mistake of visiting your web site.
Item #4… Surveys… Really? Demanding I take your insipid and self-serving survey? What do I get out of it? Nothing but… as you guessed… ANNOYED. And less likely to consume your product.
The #5 item is an especially big bone I have to pick with site owners who look to see if you have ad-blockers on and then refuse to deliver content on that basis.
Visitors are there to consume content! Period. Not to answer your ridiculous surveys, deal with annoying red blaring pop-ups or be force-fed videos and audio! And if you refuse to deliver content because we have an ad-blocker on because YOUR site engages in one, some or all of the list of tactics above, can you blame us for defending our sensibilities from your advertising desires? Trust me, if your site does #5, I block it totally and never visit again.
I understand the need for advertisement. Trust me, I get it. But this need to punish visitors who come looking for content you advertised and allowed to be indexed in the first place on a search engine? Really? You guys look pretty sad and I just move on to another site than deal with your bad manners.
Does this register on you site owner? Or are you tone-deaf as you read this article. And if you, dear reader, are a victim like myself whose sites NEVER engage is such outrageous practices, you find yourself in agreement, nodding your head and desiring for the onslaught to end.
The bottom line for you site owners that DO these things? Your tactics REEK of desperation. And your web logs probably are resulting in a decrease in visits because of your use of these technology features. Believe me, you keep it up and your sites will be ghost towns.
I’m proposing a new user-driven index and technique for cataloging well-mannered sites that promise to NEVER engage in the behaviors noted above, or similar tactics to harass visitors.
The idea is a site that indexes the site with a grade for it’s Harrasment Index or “HI”. This HI-rating would have a level ranging from a best-rating of zero to a ten which shows it to be a site to be best avoided. Sites with a zero rating would be indexed on the HI main site by as being a level-zero and allowed to fly the HI banner of approval on their site.
Sites engaging in levels 1-5 would also be allowed to fly a banner, but this level is a warning that the site engages in one or some of the practices aforementioned.
And finally, levels 6-10 get blacklisted and their sites show up as such on the main HI site index. If a plugin was made available for major browsers to pass the url to the HI servers before a visitor inadvertently tripped over a bad HI site and warns the user BEFORE they are subjected to the onslaught of harassing site behavior, then the site visitor is afforded some level of protection from these hucksters and their marketing schemes.
Let me know what you think? Am I being too critical or are my observations spot-on? I’ll do a follow-up article with a more refined vision of the HI-INDEX concept in the near future when I’ve had more time to think about it.